This book — the title is from Pasternak —is billed as ‘literary fiction’. The narrator, a Russian gambler and drinker who has settled in the West, leaves his rich American wife of two decades when he falls hard for a Russian prostitute he meets in London (‘the first and last love of my life’).
Sara Wheeler
Too clever by half
There’s not one likeable character in a novel that centres around the sort of extravagant lifestyle favoured by rich Russsians in London
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